“A vigilante cop joins forces with the father of a murder victim to interrogate the main suspect in a series of brutal child homicides.”

“Maniacs are afraid of maniacs.”

One Line Review: Big Bad Wolves is the movie Prisoners should have been.

Big Bad Wolves boasts a truly terrifying beginning that plays out over the credits without any dialogue. This is followed up with another brilliant sequence – an off-the-books interrogation with too many witnesses.

Any good discussion of this movie would spoil some of the surprises involved so I’ll keep this brief. Quentin Tarantino named this his film of the year for 2013 and it is not hard to see why. Every scene goes on just as long as it should except the final scene which is the only superfluous one in the whole movie.

“This sequel to the yakuza thriller Outrage depicts a brutal war between the Sanno and Hanabishi crime families, both now more powerful than ever.”

Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage (2010), a complicated tale of power in the yakuza, was an ActionFest winner. It was a very matter of fact tale of how things work in organized crime, with only bosses profiting while soldiers build in resentment. Events reach a very nice conclusion.

The sequel, Beyond Outrage, picks up five years later. The Sanno family has prospered. There is a bit of revisionist history as we learn that a character thought dead at the end of Outrage survived his stabbing. Other than that, events build organically from the few survivors of Outrage. It too builds to a very satisfying conclusion.

Beyond Outrage is a good Yakuza film but is likely to be a bit impenetrable unless you have seen Outrage, If you have seen Outrage then you know whether this film is for you.